PC Parts Prices Pressure Past Present (Part 2)

I remember in the at the end of 2011 i was trying to build a network attached storage server also known as a NAS . A NAS was a server design to store files and server them to computers on the network. I wanted to build it with a hardware redundant array of independent disks also known as a RAID array. I was going to use the freenas as the operating system. Freenas was a linux based operating system design specifically for Network attached storage devices. One of the coolest feature of freenas was how small it was, and it could be run from a USB Drive.

I choose to use a server case by Norco. They design server cases that use standard PC hardware. Most other server cases use proprietary motherboards and require server hardware like Xeon processors and EEC Random access memory. EEC RAM is ram that performs error checking operation so the memory is more stable. The Norco case would also fit into standard server racks. Also a downside to them is they don’t include any documentation.  I will post a listing for the case.

At the time hard disc drive (HDD) were very affordable. A two terabyte hard drive was around $70. Most manufacturers have several “grades” of hard drives they would sell. Back the western digital had their green, blue, and black drives. The green drive were usually the cheapest and they were design for normal consumers. The blue drive were made for the enterprise clients, they were more expensive and had much smaller capacity. The black drives were their high end consumer drive with pricing and capacity between their green and blue drives. The black drives had better warranties and were rated for more dependability. Now Western digital has several other colors red for their network attached storage, purple for surveillance. At the time i purchased about ten hitachi and seagate “green” grade drives

Unfortunately during the end of 2011 there was a massive flood in southeast asia. Along with the horrible loss of life many of the industrial areas were decimated. About twenty-five percent of the wolds hard drives were manufactured in thailand, and those factories were badly affected by the flood. This caused hard drive price to nearly double for the next two years. Backblaze a cloud backup company was also severely affected by this event. They have an interesting blog in it they explain how they resorted to buying external hard drive from costco to “shuck” the external enclosures to place them into their back-up machines. You can read their blog here. I don’t believe is took 2 years for the factory in Thailand to rebuild. I think the companies used that time to recoup some of their lost assets and slowly ramp down their prices.

This series of unfortunate events caused me to have to pause the construction of my network attached storage server, but it also gave me time to prune all the files i had accumulated.